


Debugging Procedures

by Theatricuddles



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22226449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theatricuddles/pseuds/Theatricuddles
Summary: When Gilfoyle gets into an accident and finds himself unable to type, Dinesh is stuck trying to help with his code for their upcoming game. But after finding out more about Gilfoyle, his opinion of the other programmer starts to change.
Relationships: Dinesh Chugtai/Bertram Gilfoyle
Comments: 5
Kudos: 44
Collections: Silicon Valley Winter Exchange 2k19





	Debugging Procedures

**Author's Note:**

> For the Silicon Valley Winter Exchange. My prompt was Dinesh/Gilfoyle and angst.

“So, that’s it then.” Richard said, looking (as usual) like he was about thirteen seconds from pulling all his hair out. “Well, I guess… I guess we’re just going to have to delay production again. For like, a year.”

“Richard, I-“

“Not… not right now, Jared.” Richard backed away from Jared, just as Jared tried to take his hand.

“Will we still have buyers after a year?” Dinesh asked.

Richard paced around, writing incomprehensible notes on a post-it he’d gotten from… somewhere. Jared, probably. “It doesn’t matter if we will or we won’t, not exactly a lot of other options,” he said, taking hold of the post-it note and tearing it into quarters.

“Maybe we can go back to the hospital and ask them if he might be able to work sooner?” Jared asked.

“That’s not how healing works, Jared. I wish it did, I really _fucking_ wish it did, but it doesn’t, so.”

“Why are you being a dick to Jared, now? He didn’t shove Gilfoyle out in front of a car,” Dinesh said.

From the way both of them glared at him, he could figure that what he said was crossing a line somehow, which felt completely ridiculous. If Gilfoyle were here, he’d be making all kinds of horribly crass jokes. But that wasn’t the topic of discussion, at least not right now, so Dinesh let it drop.

“Nobody shoved Gilfoyle in front of a car, Dinesh. It was an accident,” Richard said. “Otherwise, you’re right, and I’m sorry, Jared, I’m really sorry, I just-“

“No, Richard, I’m the one that should be apologizing.”

_Oh god,_ Dinesh thought to himself, _here we go a-fucking-gain._ The two of them also tended to do this thing when Richard was stressed out when both of them tried to out self-flagellate the other. That was another thing he could’ve done with Gilfoyle: make fun of their idiot co-workers.

He’d completely tuned out everything else they’d said, so when they finally circled back around to the topic of Gilfoyle he butted in again.

“What if we just hired more than one programmer? Gilfoyle’s not the only person who knows how to program a game, Richard.”

“With _what money,_ Dinesh? Most of the kickstarter money that we haven’t already used is reserved for shipping.”

“I don’t… I don’t know,” Dinesh snapped, “I guess maybe one of us could try and finish his programming? It’s our game engine, Richard, we know what’s going on underneath it.”  
  


“We might be programming in the same engine, Dinesh, but that’s like asking a statistician to do Calculus. Gilfoyle writes code differently from me who writes code differently from you. The only way it could work is if someone who knew Gilfoyle’s code incredibly well could…”

Richard went quiet as he met eyes with Dinesh. Jared turned to look at him all of a sudden, too.

“What? What the fuck is everyone looking at me for?” Dinesh asked.

“You’re the one who’s been arguing with Gilfoyle about his code for months. If anyone would know your way around what he’s written, it’s you,” Jared pointed out.

“Oh. No! No, no, no, no…”

*

“No,” Gilfoyle said from where he was currently sitting in his hospital bed.

“Would you rather our game not be completed, Gilfoyle?” Richard asked, pleadingly. “Because the alternative, at this point, is not “finding someone else”. Either we delay it another year until you’re fully healed, at which point I’m not sure if it’ll ever even be completed, or you agree to work with Dinesh.”

“Gilfoyle,” Jared said, stepping between Richard and Gilfoyle. “I would never ask you to do this under normal circumstances, but… you’re not going to be able to use your hands fully for another six months. Don’t think of this as Dinesh writing your code for your program. Think of it more as just Dinesh… being your hands. Does that make sense?”

“Let it be known that I would rather have my code written by three dogs banging on a keyboard than by Dinesh,” Gilfoyle stated. One of his arms was moved slightly towards his stomach, which was probably about as close as he could get to crossing his arms.

If he hadn’t spent the last half-hour insulting Dinesh in literally every way, Dinesh might’ve even felt a little sorry for him.

As it was, he was a little busy thinking of the next few months of hell he’d been dealing with, and any amount of sympathy was immediately crushed. Which was probably how Gilfoyle wanted it, honestly.

*

“Don’t put that there,” Gilfoyle said for what felt like the fiftieth time.

_Fucking Gilfoyle._ Dinesh might’ve thrown something at his head, if he had intentionally moved everything non-breakable out of arms reach. Normally, he’d calculated that smashing something over Gilfoyle’s smug face wouldn’t be worth sacrificing one of his only two mugs.

That was looking less and less likely by the minute, however. Dinesh took a nice big swig of his now-tepid coffee to try and cool his nerves.

Then he spun around in his chair to face Gilfoyle.

“Yes, you goddamn know-it-all asshole? What if I wanted to make that mistake, huh? What if I wanted to actually type a goddamn word by myself instead of following your every fucking command?”

“If I remember correctly, “following my every fucking command” was exactly what Richard and Jared asked you to do,” Gilfoyle said from where he currently had a beer bottle taped to his cast, sipping from it as he watched Dinesh work.

“Why not just use a text to speech program, then, if I’m so absolutely incompetent?” Dinesh asked, getting up to refill his cup with something, more coffee or alcohol or orange juice or literally anything that would get him away from Gilfoyle.

Unfortunately, he forgotten that Canada’s biggest douchewad could still walk just fine, even if his hands were next-to-useless at the moment.

He could physically feel Gilfoyle’s shadow looming over him as he picked something at random. Grapefruit juice? Fine, whatever. Maybe he’d try bleach next. It might taste slightly better than the taste of his own bile every single time Gilfoyle spoke.

“I’m not going to say sorry,” Gilfoyle said.

Dinesh was so frustrated he didn’t notice for a few seconds that he was, in fact, pouring grapefruit juice over the rim of the cup and into a puddle on the floor. “There’s a shocker,” he finally said, putting the cap on the juice and drinking it, ignoring the stickiness now on his fingers and shoes.

For the record, grapefruit juice was pretty disgusting.

“I am going to say that you do the work that I need finished significantly better than any text to speech feature currently on the market, or that I could easily program for that matter,” Gilfoyle said.

Despite himself, and the aforementioned disgusting grapefruit juice, Dinesh smiled.

“Admitting I do better than you could code? High praise, Gilfoyle,” he said, fighting the urge to pump his fist in the air and ruin his moment of triumph by sloshing grapefruit juice all over himself.

“I said ‘easily’,” Gifoyle added. “Given a year or so and significant research funding, I could eventually program something much more efficient than you, and with much fewer errors. But you do good work, Dinesh. I can’t make you come back, but if you want to get this done, I suggest we head back to work soon.”

Dinesh sighed and removed a roll of paper towels to wipe up some of the spilled grapefruit juice. “You’re kind of right,” he said quietly. “I was told to help you with the code, not write my own code. But can you please just be a little less nitpicky? I’m pretty sure the code that you’re having me write literally won’t work.”

At that, Gilfoyle turned a little ways away from Dinesh, mouth a thin hard line. “What I’ve told you is all things I’ve based on code I’ve written myself.”

“But I wrote every single line the exact same way you told me to. So if it it doesn’t compile, or it runs wrong, then you’ll agree that it wasn’t me screwing it up?”

“If it runs wrong, then yes,” Gilfoyle said. “So. Let’s go run it.”

“Let’s do that,” Dinesh said, dumping his juice down the sink and following Gilfoyle back to the computer.

The two of them sat back down and Dinesh ran the game. Ideally, when they started, they were supposed to load up a rocky cave background with the player character in the middle of the screen. Unfortunately, the only thing that was displaying was a blank white screen.

“Well. You were right, I guess. Go ahead and gloat,” Gilfoyle said.

It was incredibly tempting, but Dinesh still had to get through several more weeks of working on this with Gilfoyle. And the sooner he finished that, the better. “I think we might need to debug the code a little,” Dinesh said. “I can gloat to you a bit later, but why don’t we start by trying to figure out why the background won’t display.”

Gilfoyle took a drink from his beer. “Let’s do that, then.”

*

Dinesh was... actually starting to tolerate Gilfoyle. He was able to be at least relatively civil, even before Gilfoyle’s accident, but ironically now that he was forced to spend more time with Gilfoyle, he was finding it easier and easier to talk to him.

Like finding out which video games Gilfoyle liked to play in his spare time (metroidvania and fps, no surprises there). Or finding out what his favorite flavor of ice cream was (rocky road). They always started off trading complaints back and forth, but after they ran out of creative insults towards each other, it usually turned to complaining about Richard. Or complaining about the program they were using. Or complaining about the playtesters.

“I swear to god, one of them fucking got the character stuck in a wall and then didn’t write which _fucking_ wall it was,” Dinesh remarked. “How the hell am I supposed to fix it when I don’t even know where it was? Do you want me to go fucking running poor Abby into every fucking wall in existence? That’s literally _your whole goddamn job!”_

“Didn’t you know, Dinesh?” Gilfoyle remarked. “This is doing you a favor. You as a developer can’t possibly account for every scenario, so they’re just making you account for every scenario instead of explaining how to fix a really simple problem.”

It was sometime around that conversation where Dinesh realized that they were almost… having conversations. Like friends did. He wasn’t sure if he’d consider Gilfoyle a friend at this point, but he was maybe something more than a co-worker. Is there a word for “Someone who you used to hate and now actually can deal with?”

Either way, it was around this time when Gilfoyle decided to stop showing up to work. Which was (relatively) okay. They had gotten a good section of the base code down, so Dinesh worked on bug fixes as he waited for Gilfoyle to get back. There were a lot of bugs. Like, a whole fucking lot of bugs.

But the next day, Gilfoyle was out, too. And the following day, Monica came by to ask whether Dinesh had seen Gilfoyle, as if he was somehow responsible for the man now.

“No, I haven’t seen him, because he hasn’t been into work for three days, and I haven’t been anywhere beyond my shitty little apartment, because I’m too tired from _actually doing my work_ to do anything besides go home.”

Monica drew back a little at that. “Dinesh, yikes. There’s no reason to bite my head off, I was just wondering if you’d seen him. Everyone else is getting a little concerned about Gilfoyle. We were just wondering if you had any information about the fact that he hasn’t shown up recently.”

_Everyone else is getting concerned?_ Dinesh almost rolled his eyes. He was the one person who Gilfoyle had talked to most before decided to fuck off to nowhere in the middle of development. Now everyone _else_ was concerned?

He decided to finally look for Gilfoyle and eventually found him sitting at a bar a few blocks down from where the office. Most of the group would come here after work earlier, before the amount of work got rough. It was the kind of low-end place that was fun to go to in groups, and not so fun to come to alone.

“Gilfoyle, what are you doing?” Dinesh asked as he slid onto a bar stool next to him. Gilfoyle made eye contact very briefly before returning to the drink he was currently nursing.

“I’m currently dealing with the loss of my only marketable skill, Dinesh. Can’t you let a man drink himself to death in peace?” Gilfoyle asked, draining his drink.

“Wait, Gilfoyle?” Dinesh asked. “Are you-“

“No, I’m not actually suicidal, nitwit,” Gilfoyle responded. “There’s a lot more efficient ways to kill myself than drinking terrible whiskey.”

“Let me guess. Is one of them reading over my code?” Dinesh asked. He didn’t normally put himself on the chopping block when the two of them were joking back and forth, but Gilfoyle looked genuinely crestfallen.

Dinesh had at least, pretty reliably, been able to make Gilfoyle smile at least a little. No half-smile this time. Not even an exasperated shake of the head.

“Do you know part of the reason why I was so determined to prove you wrong, Dinesh? This, and every other time?” Gilfoyle asked.

“I genuinely have no idea,” Dinesh said. He figured honesty was probably the best policy, here. Or was it? He didn’t have the best track record for talking to drunk people.

Gilfoyle took a moment to thud his cast on the table a few times. “You learned how to code, Dinesh. You have a degree in CS, whatever that entailed. I don’t know how relevant that is to game design, but really that doesn’t matter. I took three months of college before I dropped out because I hadn’t made it to class in a month. I hated that the professor made me feel like I was an idiot,” he finished. “And so, when I talk to you or to anyone else, I feel…”

“Like you’re in your college class again,” Dinesh finished for him. “Gilfoyle, frankly? You’re a complete ass.”

“You’ve said that before, I think. Once or twice,” Gilfoyle said. “Anyways, it doesn’t matter now. You and everyone else could probably finish the game without me. Might as well cut back on my hours.”

“It’s really not like you to fish for compliments,” Dinesh said, before his brain caught up with his mouth.

“What.” Gilfoyle stated.

“I mean it,” Dinesh said. He’d already stuck his foot directly in his mouth, might as well go all the way, right? “Here I thought you were at least a good enough programmer to realize your own importance in this project. We’d be dead in the water without you. You do know that, right? Because if you’re trying to pretend otherwise, I’m sorry, but I think you’re a bigger idiot than I am,” Dinesh stated.

Gilfoyle looked at him a good, long time. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he stated, no emotion to the words, shoving himself to his feet.

But he did show up to work the next day.

*

And so, the two of them kept talking. And they kept spending time together. When Gilfoyle mentioned his disappointment over not being able to play Celeste because of the state of his hands, Dinesh took a break from programming to pull up the game and play a couple rounds to show Gilfoyle.

Dinesh died. A couple dozen times. He maintained that Gilfoyle’s hand resting on his own hand was probably a good part of it.

But finally, a couple months later, Gilfoyle was finally able to have his hands in a less-bulkier cast.

“I’m still under strict orders not to do anything more strenuous with my fingers than wrapping them around a coffee mug,” he pointed out to Dinesh as he sat down with a bottle of water. “But at least I’m allowed to fucking bend them.”  
  
“Can I see your hands?” Dinesh asked.

Gilfoyle shrugged. “If you’re hoping for horrible scarring, sorry to disappoint,” he said, holding up ten fingers with a clear brace on each hand.

Dinesh fit his own fingers into the spaces between Gilfoyle’s for a moment. “You’re right, no horrific scarring,” he said. “You’ve actually got pretty nice hands.”

Gilfoyle sat there for a moment, as if he was still turning the compliment over and over in his head. “Dinesh,” he said finally. “Why did you come and get me when I decided to give up a month ago?”  
  


Dinesh hadn’t heard Gilfoyle phrase it as “give up” before. He opted to glide over that in favor of a glib answer. “Everyone else was bothering me asking where you were and didn’t believe me when I told them I didn’t have a tracking device on you,” he said.

“You could’ve called me, but you came and found me. And then asked me to come back yourself. Why?”  
  


Dinesh sighed. Didn’t look like he would be able to worm his way out of this one. “It’s because I missed you, douchebag. I wanted you here with me.”

Gilfoyle was still holding Dinesh’s hand. And then a moment later, he was leaning in to kiss Dinesh. After a moment, Dinesh broke the kiss.

“What?” Gilfoyle asked.

Dinesh grinned. “If I’d have known that would finally shut you up, I would’ve done that ages ago.”

*

Once again, the five of them were in a meeting room. The only difference was that this time, their game had finally launched.

“Congratulations,” Monica said. “Y’know, for all your fighting, the two of you make a pretty good team.”

Dinesh wanted so badly to squeeze Gilfoyle’s hand, but he was pretty sure the doctor would kill him. He settled for squeezing Gilfoyle’s shoulder instead.

  
“Yeah,” he said. “We do.”

**Author's Note:**

> This turned out a little less angsty than I was hoping, but I hope it was still enjoyable.


End file.
